


This Denver Chef Taught His 5-Year-Old to Make a French Omelet, and Other Morning Intel

by SekritOMG



Category: South Park
Genre: M/M, Quarantine, learned a lot about anal lubes for this fic but no one uses any SORRY
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-22
Updated: 2020-04-22
Packaged: 2021-03-01 20:20:30
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,192
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23793001
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SekritOMG/pseuds/SekritOMG
Summary: Craig is right and you know he's right -- and, unfortunately, so does Craig.
Relationships: Clyde Donovan/Craig Tucker, Kyle Broflovski/Stan Marsh
Comments: 8
Kudos: 34





	This Denver Chef Taught His 5-Year-Old to Make a French Omelet, and Other Morning Intel

**Author's Note:**

  * For [jovishark](https://archiveofourown.org/users/jovishark/gifts).



> This is a sequel to [Pulling Mussels](https://archiveofourown.org/works/3142151?view_full_work=true), written for Jovi, who drew some [amazing art for that fic recently](https://twitter.com/jovishark/status/1251333091265671169), especially the Craig -- but then, that's hardly surprising, because her takes on Craig have shaped my visual image of Craig a lot over the years. I can't stress enough that her projects in this fandom have always impressed me with their scope and ambition, and I'm grateful for all the time and emotional energy she put in.
> 
> Nhaingen beta read! Thank you Nhaingen.

“Oh, we’re fucked, completely fucked.”

When Kyle said “fucked” his toddler looked up from the iPad sitting on his lap. Actually, how old was that kid, what—like, six?

“How old is she?” Craig asked.

“Who?”

“Your child.” Craig gestured. “The one sitting there.”

“Oh!” Alongside the mild warmth—in the low 60s, perfect for a mid-weight sweater—there was also a mild breeze, and it was hard to take Kyle seriously as his hair kept getting pushed into his eyes. He would then push it out, and try to tuck it behind his ear—it wasn’t long enough—and when it flopped back into his face, the cycle would start over. Watching it was making Craig feel itchy, or maybe that was the week spent in the house. Doggie daycare was obviously out of the question.

“You don’t know how old my child is? Agnes!” Kyle didn’t turn to look at her. “Agnes, tell Craig how old you are.”

“I’m five,” she said, indignantly, putting her hands on her hips.

Kyle rolled his eyes. “She’s four and a half.”

“I’m almost five.”

“That’s nice,” Craig told her. She was a deeply average-looking little girl, with mousy brown hair that fell to her shoulders in soft waves, brown eyes, and a baby nose that Craig could already see was going to be too big for her face. He could very easily imagine the arguments her fathers would have about the ethics of letting a 16-year-old have a nose job. To Kyle, he asked, “You swear at your five-year-old?”

“Not _at_ her.” His cheeks pinkened. “Sometimes when she’s around. But, I mean, we are fucked!”

“Why’s that?”

“Because the restaurant industry is fucked, Craig! Do you not read the news? Do you not read, I dunno, websites?”

“We may not read the same websites.”

“Yes, didn’t Grindr launch a website?”

“A digital magazine.” A beat. “It shut down.”

“I’m sure that was really disappointing for you. I’d download it—the app, I mean—but it’s just, you know, you guys live next door, and I just presume it would keep sending me your profile—assuming that’s how it even works, of course _I_ wouldn’t know—”

“I’m not _on_ Grindr,” Craig said. It was only now that he was bored of that conversation and had begun looking around Kyle and Stan’s balcony that he understood they likely wouldn’t be planting anything in the coming weeks—and neither would Craig. At least he’d kept his landscaping up over the winter, with miniature evergreens and sculptural twigs in his cleaned-up planters. After Halloween the last of Stan and Kyle’s summer petunias and vincas died away for good, leaving only spindly fire hazards in their planters. Then there was the fact that they kept letting their child draw on the concrete balcony surface with sidewalk chalk; Craig was disappointed he couldn’t be offended by it, as Aggie was a mid-talent scribbler and none of her scratchings made much sense.

“I guess Scruff would be more your thing.”

“I’m not on any gay dating apps. I’m married. We’re not looking for a third partner. I think that’s _your_ thing.”

“Agnes,” Kyle said, holding up a finger in Craig’s direction as he swerved to address his daughter. “Why don’t you go inside and ask Daddy what he’s making us for dinner.”

“But it’s early,” she said, tapping the screen of the tablet in his lap, perhaps to indicate the time.

“Well, I’m hungry! Maybe he’ll let you knead something.”

That seemed to do the trick. “Okay,” she said, gathering up her tablet, her juice box of organic chocolate milk, and her baby-pink fleece zip-up, which Craig had heard her say was “just in case” when she’d first come outside, because she was already wearing one. Bedraggled, as bodily frustrated as her primary caretaker, she stumbled back into the house. Craig heard her scream, “Daddy!” and then the beginning of “Daddy wants to know what’s for dinner,” but she shut the door midway through. Goodbye.

As if he didn’t realize there was a limit to how close he could inch toward Craig—the physical barrier where his balcony ended, several inches from here Craig’s began—Kyle leaned further over the railing. “Thank god it’s the weekend. Homeschooling is killing me. I think I’m pretty smart, right? The last time Aggie and I had to be was home all day she was half as verbal and half as mobile. I can’t even send her to our parents? This whole thing is a total nightmare.”

“I thought she wasn’t allowed to be alone with Stan’s father?”

“Oh, try to keep up, that was months ago. Plus his mother’s there, she can’t go to work now. She’s just as homestuck as we are. We’re all stuck in the house. None of us can.”

“Yeah, I’m sorry about that.” Craig was sitting on the far end of his balcony, had come out not so much to _do_ anything, but just to pretend to be outside for a while. Any time he tried to take a walk, Clyde would guilt him into taking the dogs with.

“They’re your dogs,” Craig would say.

“It’s your floor they’d crap on,” Clyde would rebut. Craig refrained from responding with, “They’re our floors,” partly because, legally, they weren’t; Clyde’s name wasn’t on the deed. More importantly, however, Craig couldn’t imagine any retort to that besides, “Well, they’re _our_ dogs,” and as far as Craig was concerned they most certainly were not.

But the refuge of the balcony proved less emancipating than promised; one of the Broflovski-Marshes was nearly always out there. Sometimes it was Stan, whose greatest shared-space fault was his proclivity for tunelessly strumming a guitar to himself; it reminded Craig of endless high school talent shows. Occasionally Craig would hear him making up a song for Aggie; nothing especially accomplished, just childlike ditties where her name featured prominently. Once when Craig was outside turning a new potting mix for his wax plant, Stan tossed out one that went, “How lucky for Aggie to live next door to Craiggy, who lived with his husband—”

For whatever reason, Craig had lifted his head and offered, “They were both kind of—”

And Stan had stopped playing, hopped to his feet, and yelped, “No thanks!”

So at least one parent in the household cared about language usage around the kid, or maybe it only applied to certain kinds of language. Craig wished it was Stan outside with Aggie today, singing her a dumb little song, rather than Kyle, who was attempting to spell out their company’s actual, serious woes, not for the first time. It wasn’t that Craig didn’t sympathize, it was just that he couldn’t _do_ anything about it.

“My poor staff,” Kyle was whining. “Normally we’d have a full house tonight. I keep thinking about the place empty. I’m having visions of never going in there again.”

“Well, you’ll have to go back in there _eventually_.”

“I mean, our margins are _razor thin_. You know I don’t even pay myself some months? It’s such a cliché, but I can’t imagine any way out of this—we built that place, you know? It’s like, my biggest achievement. I mean, after Aggie.”

Craig did not consider Aggie much of an achievement; for one thing, she was too young to reasonably assess. For another, Stan and Kyle hadn’t so much achieved her as acquired her. And if Aggie was something they’d achieved, then maybe he was something his parents had achieved—and, god, no way was he giving _them_ credit. Also, now that Aggie was mostly aware of her surroundings, Clyde couldn’t take the dogs on the balcony anymore; she was terrified of them.

“Why don’t you pivot to delivery?”

“That’s so hard! I don’t know anything about delivery.”

“Didn’t you work for Chipotle?”

“You know I did but that’s not a _delivery_ company!”

“It’s not?” Craig shrugged. “I don’t eat there. I just assumed.”

“Even if it was, implementing a delivery program for a nationwide chain is very different than doing it for a medium-sized restaurant. We’d have to scale our menu, god knows what kind of customers we’d have so what kind of supply orders would we make? Plus there’s the problem that we’re here, the restaurant’s there.”

“So? You commute there on a daily basis anyway. At least you’d have something to do.”

“What would we do with Aggie?”

At this point, Kyle probably expected Craig to volunteer to watch her—but even if he’d wanted to, which he didn’t, that probably wasn’t in line with the spirit of the thing. “Bring her with?”

“I won’t pretend that was a real suggestion.”

“I mean, your restaurant should be fine, right?” Their first year in business, they’d been longlisted for a James Beard, for interior design or something; much to Kyle’s smug pleasure, last year they’d made the shortlist for Outstanding Wine Program. The thought of it made Craig want to jump off his balcony.

“God, this is all so depressing. You have no idea what it’s like being trapped in the house with a four-and-a-half-year-old. She gets up at the crack of dawn, then there’s the homeschooling thing—and we’re out of KY? So that’s pleasant. The only thing that’s not a problem is food, obviously, and the only thing there is to do is eat, so I mean, it’s all fat pants all the time now.”

At this point Craig stood. He was wearing an Acne Studios sweater, navy blue with outrageously large raspberries printed on it. It hit at the waist, which mean he had to pull it down when he stood and it rode up his endless torso.

“How is that different from usual?” he asked Kyle.

“Just get out of here.”

“I’m going to download Scruff.”

“Oh, tell me how it is!” Kyle sounded too eager in the wake of Craig’s _plainly_ sarcastic delivery. But, maybe this whole thing was driving all of them a little crazy, forcing them to search for meaning in places it really didn’t go.

So not knowing what else to do, and honestly pitying Kyle, Craig said, “Will do,” and opened the door.

Things weren’t much better inside: Clyde was sprawled on the couch, sweats only, both dogs lounging with him—and Craig hated that, because it meant there was dog hair on Clyde’s skin, which sometimes Craig would lick? Massive issue, even aside from the couch issue, which, of course those dogs weren’t allowed on the couch, but of course that had been the first stricture to break down in the new regime, because what kind of monster would deny Clyde the simple pleasure of moping with his dogs? Craig certainly didn’t want to be that monster. With the mall closed, and with Clyde’s shoe shop teetering on the edge of insolvency anyway, he’d become almost intolerably morose, and was apparently watching that tiger thing, _again_. Craig could tell from the sound floating out of his phone. At least he turned it off—or paused it?—when Craig sat as near to the edge of the couch as possible.

With all his will, Craig refused to flinch or shift away when one of the dogs—it was impossible to tell them apart—put its paw on Craig’s thigh. At least he was only wearing light-wash jeans. Was he the _only_ person wearing jeans? He’d talked to his mother a few days ago, and it was the first time in his adulthood he’d ever seen her visibly not wearing a bra.

“Am I the only person not depressed right now?” he asked, not so much to Clyde as to himself.

“You’re not?”

“I don’t _think_ so,” Craig said. “Why, should I be?”

“Well, yeah. Right? It’s a bad situation.”

“I’m not saying I _like_ it, or I’m happy about it. But you can dislike something without being depressed about it in a clinical mental health sense—I feel bad for people, I really do. It’s just—”

“Do you feel bad for me?”

“Um, what?”

“Do you feel bad for me?” Clyde repeated.

“I don’t know how to process that question,” Craig said.

“I can’t go to work.”

“But you hate work.”

“No I don’t! I love my shop.”

“You’re just saying that _now_ because you’re so depressed you’re watching the same TV shows over and over, but you don’t love your shop. You bitch about it every single day, Clyde.”

“Yeah, but I just complain because you think it’s funny.” Craig didn’t, but he decided to let Clyde have that one. “If I actually have to close it, I mean, I don’t even want to think about it.”

“Well, Clyde, maybe you shouldn’t have that shop.”

As he was wont to do, Clyde became very quiet while he was thinking. Craig watched his fingers twitch in the dog’s fur, thinking of those fingers and where they were liable to go. It wasn’t that he, in some pique of naivete, had presumed Clyde _didn’t_ stick his fingers in a disgusting shag of dog hair on a daily basis. But he wasn’t usually spooning with them on the couch, and that was the real issue.

“I mean,” Craig continued, to try to be positive, “we’re going to be okay. I’ve still got my clients, even if I don’t know when I’ll be able to get back to the studio; I can just keep doing that from here forever. There’s the rent from your house, and I paid for this place in cash, so it’s like—we’re fine? We’re more than fine, honestly.”

“I know.”

“Do you know?”

“I mean, I know, I run my own store and I keep my own books. Well, mostly. But I mean, my dad taught me how to do that.”

“Do you want to do something else?”

“I’d need to think about it.” Clyde swallowed. “I’d miss my store. Where would I eat lunch?”

“Well, they have Subways all over.”

Clyde’s eyes softened in a way that usually meant he was going to cry.

“Or you could find a new job and a new restaurant,” Craig suggested.

“But I like _my_ job and _my_ restaurant.”

“It’s just a Subway?”

Then one of the dogs—the one that already had its paw on Craig’s thigh—nosed him in the arm, and rested its face there. Craig’s first thought was for his sweater; he had only worn it three times, and every time he’d ended up spending ten minutes in the bathroom on it with a lint roller. Nevertheless, if he had to be stuck in the house, he might as well look decent. Everyone else had given up! Such was the burden of being the only man alive with no actual desire to see or actively participate in the overgrown hunk of suburb he’d been raised in. At least his apartment was, dogs and sweatpants aside, well-curated. His wax plant was doing incredibly well, now that he’d hung it where the dogs couldn’t get it. He’d had to rent an incredibly tall ladder from Jimbo’s gun shop to thread a rope around the rafters, and the way the wax plant hung over the bromeliads filled Craig with great—something. Not joy, exactly. Hope? No, there was nothing be hopeful for at the moment. Something else, maybe. An ambition to engage in long-term planning. Desire, he realized.

“This isn’t going to last forever.” Craig patted Clyde’s bare arm. His skin was so warm; Craig would have rubbed his face into it, but it was probably covered in dog drool. “What are we still doing in fucking South Park? I don’t want to live next to Stan and Kyle anymore.”

“Stan and Kyle!” Clyde said, as if he was just remembering them. “Yeah, I miss seeing them on the balcony. Stan’s been doing Instagram stories about homeschooling? He’s trying to teach Aggie to make a French omelet.”

“That not homeschooling,” Craig scoffed. “I highly doubt a four-and-a-half-year-old is capable of making an edible French omelet.”

“No, they look pretty good, and the videos are so cute. Do you wanna see? There’s a little archived story at the top, um, I can get it—”

“No, thanks.”

“I’d eat an omelet.”

“Feel free to make one.” Craig vaguely gestured at the kitchen. “But like, what if we moved to Denver?”

“Denver ... omelet?”

“No, Denver, we could move to Denver. Or, uh, literally anywhere.”

“Like where?” Clyde asked.

“Who cares. Does it matter?”

“But, South Park is like—”

“It’s like what? It’s not like your dad lives here anymore. It’s not like I’d give a shit about missing my parents. What are we here for? The only thing that’s keeping us here is your shoe store.”

“And this apartment, though. You love your apartment!”

“They have lofts everywhere. I bought this place ten years ago, when I was basically broke and trying to build a business. But now I have a business, and a guy who lives with me, and we’re doing pretty good, you know, income-wise. What’s keeping us in South Park? Just because we’re from here, we should be here forever? Fuck that, Clyde. Kyle is right, it’s weird to live somewhere where the first people who’d pop up on a hookup app are your next-door neighbors, and also you’ve known them since you were three.”

“What?”

“Never mind. I’m going to get my phone. I’m going to Venmo them a thousand dollars.”

“What!”

Craig stood; the dog making a disgruntled noise.

“Snowy, aw.” Clyde seemed genuinely distressed. “Why are you giving them a thousand dollars?”

“Because their stupid restaurant is closed and I’m too selfish to give them our extra bottle of Swiss Navy.”

“What?”

“We need every bottle. Actually, let’s use some right now. I mean, after you take a shower.”

“For what? I— _oh_.”

“Take a shower,” Craig repeated, before slipping off the couch and heading upstairs.

Craig had left his Pixel on the bed, and he picked it up fully intending to actually open Venmo, and actually send Stan and Kyle a grand for no actual reason—or, not no actual reason. Just, guilt. Guilt was the reason. He could imagine Kyle demurring, saying he was above it, but if he didn’t want it he could donate it to his employees or some local service workers fund or whatever. They knew all the cool people in the metro Denver dining scene; probably _someone_ worthwhile was collecting money for benevolent purpose.

Whatever money Craig was saving on eating out and gasoline—the 2004 TT Roadster he’d bought when he’d opened a studio in the city only took premium; also, it was regrettably too small to fit even one great Pyrenees, oh well—he’d been trying to plug back into the economy, and as Craig leaned against the dresser to make the payment, he did some mental math. Could he afford this? Well, yeah; yeah, he could. It was a weird feeling. Craig had never felt rich until he had nothing to spend money on. Why not spend all of it? It was like he was on some kind of drug.

When he actually looked at his screen, he saw a new text from Kyle:

_We’re also out of Fleet FYI_ , frowny face.

Again, Craig felt something—oh, pity. Right. He felt _bad_ , actually: Trapped in a two-bed two-bath condo, very little outdoor space, a toddler who wants to learn how to make omelets, and no lube and no enemas. Pretty grim all around, Craig felt. Well, he told himself, that’s what you get for not buying in bulk. Should he text that? God, he really didn’t want to think about this. Maybe he should put a note on the Venmo? “For lube”?

Instead he wrote back,

_thighfuck?_

Kyle must have been busy—doing what, Craig didn’t know—because he didn’t reply immediately. After checking to make sure his phone was on silent (it was) and that they still had two bottles of Swiss Navy in the linen closet (they did), Craig stepped into the bathroom. Stripping dog hair from his sweater, he thought about the circumstances that would bear down on his decision-making. New York was ill-suited for dogs; maybe a lap dog, fine, but he couldn’t imagine finding a place to live that would accommodate two giant ones. He was in New York all the time now, flitting from showroom to studio, and while it was perfectly fun for that, the entire city smelled bad. It seemed to Craig the dire opposite of a well-constructed life: chaos, chaos everywhere, from buses spraying slush onto your boots to acrid scents that wafted from food carts all the way down the block.

LA was too expensive, and maybe it always had been. Token had moved there a year and a half ago, and they’d been twice to stay at his place, a bungalow in Los Feliz that had a starchy white façade marked by a green garage door behind which he stored his Tesla, and terraced planters built into the yard out of which erupted tacky palm trees that looked so vibrant that Craig could have sworn they were latex when he’d only seen them in pictures, except he knew what LA was like and wasn’t so naïve. The inside was all open, white on white on peach on white, with midcentury lacquered-oak cabinets and a built-in breakfast booth that Craig pleaded with Token to leave alone, not because it was good (“it’s fucking horrible”) but because it was original (“and that’s better than _good_?” “yeah, sometimes”). Craig had been out there sans Clyde twice more to finish the job, hiring people to sandblast the yawning deck you’d never know was concealed in back if you were staring from the street, and finding shocking neon Moroccan rugs to throw sloppily on the white-stained bedroom floor. The photos wound up on Curbed, headlined, “Color is Sparing and Powerful in This Minimalist Los Feliz Hideaway,” and they managed to link to Craig’s website. The work hadn’t stopped since.

Maybe they _should_ move to LA. Craig would hate the driving but he could see them bringing the dogs to Token’s and sitting on the deck under twinkle lights (de rigueur, unfortunately, like they had been in Craig’s teenage bedroom) eating takeout from one of those nice but just-okay restaurants that did takeout: Turkish-y roast chickens with giant smears of labneh, or sourdough pizza crust layered with slabs of burrata too big to fully melt, pools of canary-yellow olive oil in their rubbery skins, or enchiladas with a rainbow of moles, entire blizzards of cilantro piled higher than the foil to-go containers.

Again, Craig looked at his phone.

_Stan’s thighs are too sinewy_ ,

Kyle had written back. Okay, right, the money. With a sigh, he finally opened Venmo. Okay, okay. Time to do it already. He didn’t quite remember why he wanted to—right, the restaurant, and Kyle’s complaining. “You’ll miss me when I’m gone,” Craig appended to the payment, although he was already aware that the houses in the parts of LA worth living in cost millions, plural, and that the best things about it—the drag scene, the outcroppings along which to hike with two dogs, the obscure uses for offal in the strip malls you had to sit in gruesome traffic to get to—were things Clyde couldn’t hold with. Also Craig would hate to leave most of his shapely sweaters on the top shelves of the closet, only to be pulled out when packing for Christmas.

Then there was the fact that they couldn’t go anywhere for a while, perhaps on the order of months; they had plans to go to the Netherlands late in the summer for their anniversary, and it seemed highly unlikely even that would happen. Also, Craig would miss the heavy thunking noise Clyde made when he climbed up the staircase, which caused blood to rush downward at this point, an aphrodisiac developed over many years of Clyde only coming upstairs on weekend afternoons for sex.

Craig’s phone buzzed; Kyle had texted,

_WHAT THE FUCK_

and

_What is WRONG with you?_

and Craig turned off the screen and tossed his phone to the other side of the bed. Nothing was fucking wrong with him. He looked up as Clyde got to the landing, that big dick a telltale misdirected swell under the marling pattern of his gray sweatpants. Going upstairs always caused Clyde to lose his breath a little, and it reminded Craig of sex, too: the deep breathing, the mild gleam of light sweat.

“How do you want me?” Clyde asked, between breaths.

“Oh.” Craig leaned back onto the heel of his hand, planted behind him on the bed. Intoxicated by the promise of escaping as much as he was unbothered by being trapped with the only person he could look forward to being trapped with, he hadn’t thought much about what it was he actually wanted to _do_ , other than burn off some calories before dinner, and live with the thrilling knowledge of having done something Stan and Kyle couldn’t.

“I’m just happy you’re here,” Craig said. “Any way’s all right with you.”


End file.
